It was precisely on the way to Estremadura when you got the news. For personal reasons she was traveling to Badajoz and on the way she picked up the phone to find out that she had won the National Prize for Letters 2022 -given by the Ministry of Culture and Sports–. to the writer extremeño Luis Landero Duran (Albuqueque, Badajoz, 1948) has caught him by surprise.
He treasures prizes and he still hasn’t gotten used to it. The first was in 1990, almost 30 years ago and only one year after publishing his first novel. late age games. Since then the awards have not stopped. In 2005 the Medal of Extremadura arrived and just this 2022 he has been in charge of giving the speech in the highest awards in the region. Landero assures that these “things are never expected”. “What am I going to say about it? It’s a tremendous joy and pride. I feel grateful and very happy, “she declares.”I didn’t even know it was failing today. I’m surprised”, recounts. “The truth is that I don’t expect any prize, if it does come then it’s welcome, but it’s an immense honor,” she adds.
“In each line I give myself in a non-negotiable way to the lyrics”
“He has maintained, with the same eagerness, the pulse and originality that already appeared in his literary beginnings and that has led him to preserve among his readers an enormous capacity for amazement,” the jury highlights about the novelist. “I think that is what I agree with the jury the most.. From my first poems when I was 15 years old until now I have tried to do things the best I know and give my best. In each book, in each line, I give myself in a non-negotiable way to literature, to letters. I hope they are also right in the other compliments they give me”, such as the fact that they give him this award “for being an extraordinary narrator, creator of numerous fictions with highly expressive characters and atmospheres and excellent writing, recovering the Cervantes tradition with mastery of humor and irony and brilliantly incorporating the role of imagination””.
In his adolescence poetry and music arrived; later literature and teaching. Nevertheless, his childhood in the 50s, in the middle of the postwar period, in the rural environment of Extremadura made a dent in his life and therefore he has expressed it over the years with his writing. He grew up in a peasant family and from his land he not only has good words, he also has good letters. “Many things that I write about are very inspired by what I experienced in my childhood in my town. All that world that I knew as a child, the way of speaking of my parents, of my whole family marked me. Their way of expressing themselves was the school of my literature”. A clear example is his work The balcony in winter, an autobiographical novel that goes from his experiences from his early years in Albuquerque to his move to Madrid to study Hispanic Philology at the Complutense University. Others are the story of This is my land, the novel Emerson’s orchard or the guitarist. “These are stories that I like to tell,” he ditches.